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On 26 June 2018, 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th congressional district, defeating incumbent Joe Crowley. If she should similarly win the November 2018 general election, she would become the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

A month later, a Facebook user posted a now-deleted meme that quoted Ocasio-Cortez as saying she had no concerns whether Medicare cost billions or trillions of dollars, because she either didn’t understand or was dissembling about the difference in magnitude between those numbers.

Many viewers (especially those who encountered the meme apart from its original context) came away thinking that the statement attributed to Ocasio-Cortez was — or could be — real. However, that the quote used in the meme was a fabricated one created as a parody was indicated by the comment that accompanied the meme’s original posting on Facebook: “she deserves all the parodies. all. of. them.”

The fabricated nature of the statement was specifically confirmed in another Facebook comment from the same poster:

Ocasio-Cortez was previously the subject of a fabricated video interview created by the Conservative Review television network (CRTV), which was also claimed to be satirical in intent:

Republicans are so scared of me that they’re faking videos and presenting them as real on Facebook because they can’t deal with reality anymore.

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Snopes.com has long been engaged in the battle against misinformation, an effort we could not sustain without support from our audience. Producing reliable fact-checking and thorough investigative reporting requires significant resources. We pay writers, editors, web developers, and other staff who work tirelessly to provide you with an invaluable service: evidence-based, contextualized analysis of facts. Help us keep Snopes.com strong. Make a direct contribution today. Learn More.